Faculty and Guests

Madhu H. Kaza was born in Andhra Pradesh, India, and works in New York City as a writer, translator, artist, and educator. She is the author of Lines of Flight and the editor of Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores connections between translation and migration. She is a translator of contemporary Telugu women writers, including Volga and Vimala. Her guest curation of writing from less translated languages appeared as a special feature in the Summer/Fall 2022 issue of Gulf Coast, and she served as a 2021 juror for the National Book Awards. Her work has appeared in the Yale Review, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Two Lines, Waxwing, Chimurenga, and more. She worked for several years for the Bard Prison Initiative, most recently as Assistant Dean of the Bard Microcolleges, and teaches in the MFA Writing program at Columbia University.

Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor based in New York. His translations of Russian avant-garde writers include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms  and the National Translation Award-winning An Invitation for Me To Think by Alexander Vvedensky, co-translated with Eugene Ostashevsky for NYRB Poets. He has been awarded fellowships for translation by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Dead Winter. He is editor of World Poetry Books, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation, and teaches translation for the Writing MFA at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Jennifer Grotz, Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling, as well as Window Left Open, The Needle, and Cusp. Also a translator, she’s published two books of translations from the French: Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Rochester Knockings, by Tunisian-born novelist Hubert Haddad. Her co-translations with Piotr Sommer from the Polish of Jerzy Ficowski’s Everything I Don’t Know received the PEN America Best Translated Book of Poetry Award in 2022. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she teaches poetry and translation at the University of Rochester. 

Anton Hur is a Korean literary translator and the author of Toward Eternity. He was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. He won a PEN Translates grant for his translation of The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae and a PEN/Heim grant for Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, the latter of which was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. His translation of Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City was longlisted for the same prize in the same year. His translation of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets and Lee Seong-bok’s Indeterminate Inflorescence were longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Awards. His other translations include Baek Sehee’s I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and a co-translation of Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. He has taught at the British Centre for Literary Translation, the Ewha University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. Anton is a judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

Aaron Robertson is a writer, translator from Italian, and editor. His nonfiction debut, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2024, named one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and chosen as one of the New York Public Library’s 10 Best Books of 2024. It was also recognized as a best book of the year by the Boston Globe, New Republic, Essence, and the Chicago Public Library. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award. In 2021, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for translation. His writing has been featured in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. A former board member of the American Literary Translators Association, Aaron is currently an advisory editor for Paris Review and served as a judge for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

Damion Searls has translated sixty books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, including modern classics by Proust, Gide, and Nietzsche; Mann, Hesse, Walser, and Wittgenstein; Rilke, Jelinek, and Modiano; Victoria Kielland, Ariane Koch, and Nescio; and a dozen books by Jon Fosse. A Guggenheim, Cullman Center, and two-time NEA fellow, he edited Thoreau’s The Journal for NYRB Classics and is the author of The Inkblots: a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator. His latest books are The Philosophy of Translation and The Mariner’s Mirror, a poetry chapbook.